Boris Johnson Wins the Race for Mayor

It would not be untrue to say that the Coalition government has not been popular since taking office in 2010 yet Boris Johnson seems as popular as ever with Londoners as he was re-elected as Mayor of London and is even being tipped by some as to taking over the Conservative party from David Cameron. Emotions were running high on May the 3rd when Johnson narrowly rose to victory with 1,054,811 votes whilst Ken Livingstone was in second place with 992,273 votes.

This post is dedicated to what makes Johnson so great that in such desperate times where gloom and doom is all we see he was selected by London to get us through. The race for Mayor was a tedious if not long but entertaining along the way, no doubt. Supporters took to twitter in order to gather votes for their favoured candidate, #backboris2012 was seen as trending but twitter also caused outrage among Labour party as they demanded that Johnson give back the ‘@Mayor of London’ account which he transferred to his own name. Anyhow that seems redundant now since he’s back. So, what are his plans for his next four years in office?

Well firstly he wants to, in his own words, head ‘an honest and unflinching’ investigation as to why foreigners are getting jobs as opposed to Londoners. However, this is not the only agenda on a long list of problems that Johnson will have to face, amongst record numbers of youth and female unemployment, the recession, the housing crisis and the upcoming Olympics which he believes are a fantastic opportunity for leading us out of the recession.

One of the reasons why we did back Johnson in the race between him and Ken Livingstone of the Labour party is that the latter faced a huge backlash in that his own party contained quite a number of candidates who themselves said they would not be supporting Livingstone. Lord Sugar also spoke out against Livingstone, whilst his tax avoidance was brought to light. Johnson, on the other hand, has claimed to be ‘different’ from the rest of his party, and vows strongly to cut council tax. Whether he is able to secure his vision of London becoming a perfect metropolis, an example for the world to be envious of is something we will have to wait for.

It is clear that in the last five days Boris Johnson has shown a lot of promise and set out to change London for the better but will he? Only time will tell. In the meantime, I leave you with a quote from the man himself ‘Life isn’t like coursework, baby. It’s one damn essay crisis after another’